Jesse Bockstedt

Abstract

With growing competitive pressures to cut costs and become more innovative, firms are increasingly looking beyond their organizational boundaries to seek new ideas, manage innovation, and solve business problems. Digitization and the global reach of the Internet enable cost-effective online platforms that allow crowds of people to come together to generate and share content. Toward this end, several new business models based on online crowdsourcing have emerged recently. These new crowdsourcing companies provide services for everything from financing and software development to logo design and data analysis. Leading examples in this new area include 99designs, TopCoder, uTest, and Kaggle. In this talk we will discuss the key characteristics of these new business models, the types of problems for which crowdsourcing is best suited, and potential challenges to using a crowdsourcing platforms.

Biography

Jesse Bockstedt is an assistant professor of Management Information Systems at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses in two streams: behavioral economic issues in electronic commerce and the impacts of information technology evolution on consumers and markets. His work has been published in several major IS journals including Information Systems Research,Journal of MIS, MIS Quarterly, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, andIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on electronic commerce strategy, social media, web development, and data networking.